Posted by xikuzus on 7/25/2006, 5:29 pm
217.149.103.209

3 pages of holder text from http://www.spectator.co.uk/online-edition/20041106-luxury-goods-special-i/12785/style-council.thtml page 1 Style council The past 20 years have not been happy times for lovers of pure, unadulterated glamour. The global hegemony of Anglo-Saxon culture has done to style what the Crusades did to Arab-Christian understanding — as any glance at the baseball-capped hordes marauding down a British high street on a Saturday afternoon will show. How can we begin the fightback? Some might prefer a national demonstration for the reintroduction of glamour. But if two million people shouting ‘Stop the War’ failed to persuade the PM of the folly of invading Iraq, it is hard to see how two million shouting ‘Stop the Grunge’ could be any more successful. The ancient Chinese philosophers advise us to begin any great enterprise with a small step. The single most effective way for us to begin the battle for a more colourful, exciting and stylish world is to head down to St James’s and buy a cigarette holder. By smoking with a cigarette holder, you are doing two things. First, you are enjoying the pleasures of tobacco in the safest way possible: a silicon filter inserted in the holder reduces the intake of tar and other carcinogens by up to 30 per cent. Secondly, you are cocking a snook at the puritans and grunge merchants determined to eliminate the last vestiges of style from our lives. Surely there is no single item known to man more stylish, sophisticated or downright sexy than a cigarette holder. There is also, in this age of corporate-induced uniformity, no item more subversive. Cigarette holders first appeared on the scene in the 1920s, the essential fashion accessory for any flapper or self-respecting bohemian. An early populariser of the habit was Edith Nesbit, poet, Fabian and author of The Railway Children. For Nesbit, a long cigarette holder ‘became part of the picture she suggested — a Raffish Rossetti, with her long full throat and luxuriant hair, smoothly parted’. Unsurprisingly, Nesbit always found herself ‘surrounded by adoring young men’, dazzled by ‘her magnificent appearance’. The cigarette holder entered a new golden age with the invention in Germany of the Denicotea filter in 1932. Described as ‘the ultimate means to reduce tar and nicotine and avoid yellow fingers’, the so-called DA cartridge meant that smoking with a holder was not only drop-dead sexy but could be healthier, too. As a supreme irony, a few months after the breakthrough, the most tabagophobic government in history came to power in Germany. Berlin, spiritual cigarette-holder capital of the world in the 1920s, became, in 1939, the first city in the world to ban smoking in public places. In the free world, things were thankfully still done differently. In those glorious, smoke-filled days of the 1930s and 1940s, almost anyone who was anyone could be seen smoking with a cigarette holder. World leaders and politicians from across the political spectrum: FDR, Pandit Nehru, Josip Broz Tito; military men like Douglas MacArthur; gangsters like Al Capone. Britain’s bestselling writer of the interwar period, Edgar Wallace, made the cigarette holder his trademark, as did its most famous composer of musical plays, Noël Coward. For Hollywood or Elstree starlets of the age, smoking with a cigarette holder was almost de rigueur. Today’s ‘stars’ hold wedding parties where guests are issued with matching pink tracksuits and are served with hamburgers. Sixty years ago, they sat in nightclubs, sipping pink champagne and exhaling nonchalantly as the band played on. Next page